Exxon says world set to fail 2°C global warming cap by 2050

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/exxon-projects-oil-gas-be-54-worlds-energy-needs-2050-2023-08-28/

by myshpa • 3 years ago

71 141 3 years ago

staunton4• 3 years ago

While I agree with the prediction, the tone they use seems somewhat too close to "well, if we're not going to make it anyway, how about we sell some more fossil fuels?"

bamboozled2• 3 years ago

Exxon produces less than 3% of the world's daily crude demand and in May its shareholders overwhelmingly rejected calls for stronger measures to mitigate climate change.

What else can be said, there are assholes that are legally allowed to actually pursue this and there is absolutely nothing in the way of the law that's going to stop it.

Our current system of governance isn't equipped for this.

Loughla• 3 years ago

This is one of those problems that takes either collapse or dictator to fix. It's just too big and nebulous for society as it is to even acknowledge it across the board.

The problem with both of those things is all the dead people.

But we seem to think we can just keep skating by like we are in perpetuity.

chpatrick20• 3 years ago

Until people are willing to use less energy or consume fewer goods and services (that cost energy to produce), it's going to be difficult to achieve.

You can blame the big evil corporations but they're polluting so we can buy our crap from them.

DarkNova67• 3 years ago

The past decades have shown the massive shift from public/national actors to the private actors. It is just as expected that now, the government cannot act strong enough to fight against a (global) crisis of the common people. Or perhaps it is the cause why we face so many threats to our planets all so seemingly suddenly.

Most of all, consultancies have taken the job of people in ministries. This brain drain is another reason why the government seems so lobotomized to outsiders. But when one of your large clients is Exxon mobile and another team should consult a government about climate change... oh well

machina_ex_deus• 3 years ago

Our profits margins are lacking, please do force some artificial scarcity so we get some of our power back after the competition in our field eroded our power!

Notice how every suggestion for fighting climate change always involves preventing new oil competitors from developing while doing nothing about existing oil fields?

They are laughing all the way to the bank as they know the world depends on them and can't possibly detach that dependence, renewables barely make a dent in that. They don't care about total oil consumption only profit margins.

simmerup• 3 years ago

There’s nothing artificial about the budget of carbon emissions we have before each temperature increase is bought. Increasing the cost of fossil fuel is a good way to make alternative energy more appealing to investors

myshpa4• 3 years ago

Fossil Fuel Subsidies Surged to Record $7 Trillion

https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/08/24/fossil-fuel...

... fossil-fuel subsidies rose by $2 trillion over the past two years as explicit subsidies (undercharging for supply costs) more than doubled to $1.3 trillion ...

Our analysis shows that consumers did not pay for over $5 trillion of environmental costs last year. This number would be almost double if damage to the climate was valued at levels found in a recent study published in the scientific journal Nature ...

fsloth6• 3 years ago

The only way to make non-fossil energy sources more appealing, is to make fossil sources more expensive.

The side-effect of this is, yes, unfortunately increased profits for oil companies.

I don't know if these could be cut down using some windfall tax scheme.

quickthrower22• 3 years ago

Not if the increased cost is due to tax

sokoloff3• 3 years ago

Why would a much higher fuel tax, imposed on crude oil, and scaled in at 30% immediately and 10% over each the next 7 years, not work?

gampleman• 3 years ago

The only way to make non-fossil energy sources more appealing, is to make fossil sources more expensive.

Really? That seems pretty suboptimal to me. How about trying to make them cheaper/more reliable?

ZoomerCretin• 3 years ago

You can also subsidize clean energy, which is what we've been doing.

rex_lupi• 3 years ago

...."thanks to us".

wiredfool• 3 years ago

Back in the early 90's (post Valdez), a friend of mine had a tshirt:

  At Exxon, we don't have to care, 
  Because at Exxon, 
  We're Part of the Problem

delta_p_delta_x• 3 years ago

Nice to rub it in our faces, I guess. Thanks, Exxon.

They knew about this in the 1980s, and have actively laboured to hide it from the public[1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...

Edit: People have got to stop assuming that commenters are American...

flakeoil3• 3 years ago

Well, everyone did, or at least the US congress.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NOdTEIihFU

It's easy to blame the oil companies, but in fact, the governments around the world did not care or do anything about it. Car manufacturers did nothing to decrease size of their cars or fuel efficiency (certainly not the last 20 years). And consumers did not bother to buy smaller and more fuel efficient cars.

Everyone has known about global warming for 40 years. Everyone blames oil companies and not themselves.

If we completely stopped to use or at least massively reduced the usage of oil then there would be no rich oil companies.

It's easy to blame someone else.

[1] Carl Sagan testifying before congress in 1985.

joker_minmax4• 3 years ago

Even Margaret Thatcher made a speech about global warming. George HW Bush also believed in it.

breakyerself5• 3 years ago

I blame government AND fossil fuel companies. Harder to blame individuals when they're just trying to survive in a system they didn't build and have little power to change and they happen to be targets of PR campaigns to make them doubt reality. Funded by fossil fuel money.

myrmidon8• 3 years ago

Just saying: Al Gore was up for election 23 years ago, and climate change was basically his entire platform.

The inconvenient truth is that the average voter wasn't and still isn't willing to sacrifice ANYTHING significant to combat climate change.

Blaming corporations is unhelpful and reeks of hypocrisy.

mistermann3• 3 years ago

Another Inconvenient Truth is that the very structure of our political systems may make it literally impossible to fix this problem. And unfortunately, our culture is not able to discuss reforming institutions, perhaps due to an excess of faith (kill religion and it has to go somewhere maybe).

red-iron-pine• 3 years ago

The average voter barely knows how their own income tax works, let alone a carbon tax.

Voter perception is shaped by marketing, and large energy companies lobbied hard, very hard, to shape public opinion about global warming, to include, famously, hiring Oglivy to launch a campaign about individual responsibility instead of the systemic, constant push by industry.

Example:

https://clear.ucdavis.edu/blog/big-oil-distracts-their-carbo...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oi...

matthewdgreen3• 3 years ago

Al Gore won the US popular vote and lost the electoral college vote by a whisker (and a recount.) The average voter was not opposed to his pro-climate agenda. If anything, the narrow nature of Bush’s win was due to his very pro-business agenda (which was huge on benefits for fossil fuel drillers). The idea of a candidate winning the popular vote and losing the electoral college may not seem surprising today, as politicians have optimized their pitch to appeal to the narrowest slice of the electorate they can win with — but it was extremely unusual back then (in fact Gore was the first Presidential candidate since the 1800s to lose this way.) The partisan Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision that decided the recount is also one of the most shameful partisan episodes in our country’s history.

ZeroGravitas2• 3 years ago

Al Gore won the popular vote by half a million.

There's a whole lot of wild assumptions built into your comment, but that seems like a basic flaw.

breakyerself5• 3 years ago

If the average voter hadn't been the target of PR campaigns by fossil fuels companies to make them doubt the science I might agree with you.

formvoltron• 3 years ago

Is this another way of saying our profits are secure with your DCF models!?s

Pxtl• 3 years ago

werealltryingtofindtheguywhodidthis.gif

pnut2• 3 years ago

Amusing that fossil fuel companies are now both

- Acknowledging that Anthropogenic Global Warming is real, and - Revealing that their confidence on its effects is so strong, they can publicly predict its impact on global climate decades into the future.

I guess from their perspective, in spite of all criticism, they are just accommodating the energy demands of the global market, which have been universally "more energy now" until very recently.

fsloth6• 3 years ago

It's a mess.

Energy companies are both huge part of the problem - and at the same time the only reason modern civilization exists.

Hydrocarbons are primary input still to most of the processes we have to exist above ... well, actually exist, because the alternative with this amount of people to hydrocarbon driven economy is mass starvation.

The energy companies should be taken to court for the damage they have done to planet via their anti-climate-action PR.

But, at the same time we need their product to live.

avidphantasm• 3 years ago

Large energy companies should be nationalized and run rationally, i.e. in a way that acknowledges the extreme scarcity of waste absorption capacity we are faced with.

fulafel• 3 years ago

I think the more consistent counterfactual scenario without mass hydrocarbon extraction would be to consider that population would not have grown to the current level (instead of imagining the current population and a sudden disappearance of hydrocarbons).

acdha3• 3 years ago

But, at the same time we need their product to live.

This isn’t a binary choice. Imagine how much better off we’d be now if they’d accepted their own scientists’ reports in the 1970s and tried to get in on greening the economy instead of funding decades of obstruction? Jimmy Carter could have gotten his nuclear power plants, the remaining ICE vehicles would use a fraction of the fuel as the average vehicle purchased in the United States today, and we’d be saving our carbon emissions for things which are harder to replace like industrial chemistry rather than literally heating the outdoors so someone doesn’t need to wear long sleeves to dinner.

bratbag• 3 years ago

They have gone from denial to 'It's too late so don't bother to try stopping us' as a propaganda strategy.

This is just part of that.

gooseus• 3 years ago

It's not happening and there isn't anything to worry about... right up until the moment when it's already happened and there isn't anything that can be done.

I recently heard it referred to as "The Slow Breakup" pattern[1] from a Youtuber who has done a great job (though tone is a little much sometimes) of breaking down alt-right propaganda and rhetoric, though these tactics can be used by any political movement.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpUN0q35Lak&list=PLJA_jUddXv...

Arnt3• 3 years ago

"Don't bother to try stopping us"? When you're the paying customer, it's easy for you to stop your vendor from selling to you.

nightski• 3 years ago

"Big bad energy companies" is tiring. We demand the energy. Sure they should be held liable for lying. But it would be hard to convince me that if they did tell the truth things would of played out any different.

Energy is the life blood of our civilization.

karmakurtisaani• 3 years ago

They knew about CC 40 years ago. Their response was to do the same as tobacco industry did: resist all evidence and misinform the public in favour of profits. If that hadn't happened, we would absolutely have been sharper with our response.

insanitybit• 3 years ago

I think if disinformation about Global Warming hadn't been rampant since the 80s directly due to the actions of these companies, that would be great. We could have been talking about these goals decades ago, we wouldn't have presidents and other elected officials running on a campaign that it's fake and we shouldn't care.

I think hell would be too good for the people who knew about this issue and lied for decades about it to try to turn a buck, instead of just doing the obvious thing and investing in new energy technologies.

joker_minmax4• 3 years ago

Yes, the same way America is outsourcing most of our carbon emissions whenever we claim to be reducing them, it is tiring. However the fact that they continue to also poison us directly by evading or influencing environmental regulations and lie about that stuff too - I wish I could see a beatdown.

breakyerself5• 3 years ago

The physical safety of executives at places like Exxon is at least in part dependent on the fact that people like me have too much to lose. They don't just deserve blame. They deserve some kind of justice.

Nobody has made them invest in more and more infrastructure instead of alternative energy. Nobody made them pay public relations companies to spread FUD about climate science and mitigation. These people are guilty of crimes against humanity as far as I'm concerned.

JumpCrisscross• 3 years ago

which have been universally "more energy now" until very recently

They’re still that. The nature of competition suggests they’ll always be that. Trying to square the circle without acknowledging that led to a lot of failed environmental policy over the past decades.

gcr• 3 years ago

Is Exxon saying that? It sounds like this article is combining Exxon’s profit forecast of “the world will use 25 billion metric tons of oil in 2050” with the IPCC’s “that won’t be enough to keep below 2 degrees” report, whether or not Exxon actually acknowledges the latter

joker_minmax4• 3 years ago

They have now shifted to saying that they're part of the clean energy revolution or something of that sort. I started seeing commercials with this rhetoric a few years ago, but I see even more now.

thelastgallon• 3 years ago

Its more insidious. Give us hundreds of billions of dollars for carbon capture, we'll capture and ... use it for enhanced oil recovery.

Shell Is Looking Forward The fossil-fuel companies expect to profit from climate change. I went to a private planning meeting and took notes: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/shell-climate-change...

Algorithm:

1) Give us trillions of dollars in subsidies[1] to extract oil, well, because, people need it

2) Give us billions of dollars now for carbon capture (and this will increase), shows Greta's picture, because, erm, we are taking action on climate change

3) We'll extract more oil [3] (enhanced oil recovery, EOR) using the captured carbon to increase both (1) and (2)

Oil industry is exceptionally good at stealing everyone's money. Now there is some light on climate change, you can bet that oil industry will get hundreds of billions of dollars. The climate conversations are completely taken over by big oil: Sultan Al Jaber was named President-Designate of COP28 UAE in January of 2023. He is the chairman and a founder of the UAE's renewable energy company Masdar.

Trillions will be spent worldwide on carbon capture (not just the plants, but infrastructure for EOR such as pipelines[4]), all of which directly goes into big oil pockets.

[1] Worldwide subsidies for fossil fuels surged to a record $7-trillion in 2022, equal to 7.1% of the global gross domestic product, according to a new report by the International Monetary Fund: https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2023-08-28-fossil-fu...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_United_Nations_Climate_Ch...

[3] Out of the 27 commercially operational CCS projects worldwide, 21 inject carbon dioxide into oil reservoirs to force out petroleum: https://www.landclimate.org/what-is-happening-with-carbon-ca...

[4] CO2 pipelines: There are now about 5,300 miles of CO2 pipelines in the U.S., but in the next few decades, that number could grow to more than 65,000 miles

[5]It Will Cost More Than Total Future Production to Clean Up California Oil Sites: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36182016

BLanen• 3 years ago

In 2015, investigative journalists uncovered that ExxonMobil had known that burning fossil fuels would lead to potentially catastrophic climate impacts as early as the late 1970s. Subsequent reporting showed that the company, and its oil and gas industry peers, likely knew about these impacts as early as the 1950s.
This January, Harvard researchers published a new report that showed that not only did Exxon know about climate change, they were predicting the exact amount of global warming we’re now experiencing with remarkable accuracy.

exxonknew.org (The website is now changed to an emberassing star wars theme sadly.)

Shell also knew very early:

https://www.ftm.eu/articles/shell-climate-coal

I guess from their perspective, in spite of all criticism, they are just accommodating the energy demands of the global market, which have been universally "more energy now" until very recently.

Most comments here comes down to 'that's just humanity man' while these are people that spend millions if not billions on manipulating public perception of fossil fuels even though they knew they were lying and inflicting actual harm on the world. It would've cost the economy much much less if we had started transitioning in the 1970s instead of knowingly leaving externalized debt to the rest of humanity.

brucethemoose2• 3 years ago

Meanwhile they (allegedly) fund stuff like this:

https://co2coalition.org/facts/

Geisterde2• 3 years ago

Anyone ever heard of the conversation of happiness? Happiness cannot be created or destroyed, only taken. See I have a good idea of where we are headed and what could be done to fix it; energy shortages and nuclear respectively. When the wind and solar people are crying that we failed these warming goals and still don't have stable electric grids, I will be laughing; its pretty obvious what environmentalist policies do to anyone who understands energy, and I'm prepared.

joker_minmax4• 3 years ago

A diversified profile needs to exist to meet fluctuating demand. I think energy storage or some long term reliance on natural gas is baked in to any sort of emergency response, because nuclear is harder to adjust willy nilly. But yeah it's hard to ignore the largest low-carbon baseload power source

Geisterde2• 3 years ago

There is a possible way to offset this, an energy consumer of last resort, someone who's paying you more than nothing but doesn't compete with other demands. Bitcoin mining is ideal because it can be deployed anywhere at any scale, it can ramp up to soak up excess power off peak, and ramp down to provide it back to the grid. Since mining is a globally decentralized competition for cheap energy, its unlikely it would ever price out other uses of energy, which could be limited by contract anyways.

moralestapia• 3 years ago

So, it turns out that the world will not stopping using oil in the foreseeable future? Colour me surprised.

onewheeltom• 3 years ago

They should know, after all …

Exxon says world set to fail 2°C global warming cap by 2050

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